The Squib
by nargles15
Summary: The muggles began to wonder why. Why their nation was so dark. Why their daughters died. Why their minister did nothing. Why fog stalked their land for years. Until they learned. What happens when magic isn't might.
1. Prologue

The muggles began to wonder why.

It started small. Why that grizzled shop hadn't been torn down. _That place has been around for ages, you think with the location they'd find someone to fill it. _Why the platforms were packed and then emptied like a rolling wave on the same September morning each year. Why they reached a destination they were previously sure of and suddenly forgot something they were equally sure they'd brought with them.

But then the lands grew dark like their questions. Why their bridges collapsed. Why there were so many murders. Why fog coated their lands.

Their minister's hair faded, as all politicians' do. Their girls went missing, as girls do. Their families were found dead in their beds, their faces pulled and waxen, like they were as surprised that they died as the one's reading the story in the morning paper.

It's easier not to wonder. For years they didn't. Centuries. Entire generations swelling and dying, like crowds on a platform, and never once did they question it, not really.

Until one day their waning-haired politician spoke to them, freely and honestly, and that was the biggest indicator that they should have known something was wrong. That something was very, very wrong.

A veil lifted, like the sun that had returned, and suddenly it was all clear. All much, much too clear.

The minister cleared his thin throat. "I have questioned whether I'm leading the country down the right path here. I have spent many a sleepless night. My wife will attest. But, I feel there's one thing I owe this nation that I haven't been able to give it. There's one thing I owe the citizens of this country that have been so brutalized by an enemy we didn't even know we were fighting."

The minister of the muggles shuffled his pages. The muggles across the country turned up their sets. Bars fell silent, no bells rang from churches, an unnatural hush across the country.

"It came to my attention, in the early days spent in this great office, that there are people who live among us. People who are not like you or I. People who would do us harm. People we couldn't even begin to fight."

The silence dampened. A mother held her breath. A man gripped his chair even tighter. _Immigrants. Those boats full of monsters. _Students let their beers warm.

"Until now. I have not been a perfect Prime Minister. Many of you have wondered what I have been doing these long years, have wondered why I have sat back while dark times stalked our country."

The minister of the muggles put down his papers and spoke to the lens, through the grainy film. "I assure you. I have not. At the risk of leaving my legacy soiled, of surely being thrown in the Psych Ward, or of being subjected to the vitriol _The Sun_ will no doubt print in tomorrow's run, I have chosen to let this country know what we are facing and who exactly we are dealing with."

The minister of the muggles took a breath. Perhaps he was steadying himself. Perhaps he was having doubts. Perhaps there was something greater he was fighting, like an invisible hand around his throat. He cleared it again and felt the fingers loosen.

"There live, as surely as you or I, among us a race who is responsible for our suffering. Their borders can be found on no map. Their country can be found represented at no United Nations council. Their minister at no state dinner. Their borders are our borders. Their faces are our faces. But they are not like us. There is something cursed in their blood, something that they have been using against us for years. They have been enslaving this great nation. They have entangled us in their wars. They have thrown our children at their causes for their sport. They have warned each Prime Minister before me of their existence and nothing has been done until today. For today…"

And suddenly the picture changed. A muggle in a black suit entered, grasping the upper arm of a man with a black hood over his head. The minister of the muggles stood and the camera followed his movement, swift, like water.

The minister of the muggles latched his grip tight to the masked man and, with something greater than triumph, pulled it off.

"We have one."

The man, tall and pale with shocking red hair lank around his grime-coated face, sunk to his knees. His chin hit the desk and the minister of the muggles tightened his grip around the man's neck.

"Wizards."

It's easier not to wonder. When you are the deaf, dumb one, when your face is crushed under the boot, when your lips are curled around the curb. It's just easiest not to ask. You will waste your last moments, something so precious, on that question, something so pointless. Unless you know where the ankle is weakest. Unless you know how to turn it, bend it, and hear the snap. If you know how to wait. If you know how to bide your time. Then why is a very useful question indeed.

_Do onto others as you would have them do unto you. _No one dared to flip that around and ask what it really could mean. What it meant when the boots changed hands. What it could really allow someone to do once they finally got to lace them up.


	2. Chapter 1

Harry had never wanted to come back.

He didn't know how Sirius had done it. He'd have said this to Hermione, but she was still so white-faced and set, already spreading her maps across the kitchen table, that he didn't bother.

He had always known, life when Hermione was your only best friend was a quiet one.

The muggles had had Ron for six months.

Ginny had barely escaped the first round of purges. She collapsed on the staircase, sweat and blood flicking off onto the cream carpet, gripped the gauze with her teeth and redressed her hand. Her hair, chopped short, fell into her eyes like his did. They'd found some spaces to pull each other's, desperate, grasping, hungry. But she'd lost her brother on national TV. And her father in the Ministry purges. And her broom, so Harry was her only outlet. He knew that. And there was only so much they could do with Hermione around without their insides squirming, both knowing what she had lost. The day Ginny chopped her hair, Hermione bid them a bloodless good night while the sun had barely started setting and they didn't see her until noon the next day.

It was a small kitchen. Harry supposed Vernon would have loved to know that. That some poor bastard on Magnolia Crescent suffered under these constraints. He'd have to check the garage to see their car.

"I know. But we know it's safe." Ginny was looking up at him, again reading his mind.

"It's not Privet."

"It's close enough."

"I'll be fine."

"Just as long as you don't start going 'round singing _God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs_."

Hermione whipped her neck around, tight and fast, the crick ringing through the linoleum and dust-coated kitchen. "Don't."

"Hermione, they can't hear us."

"Just _don't_."

Ginny sighed and shrugged. "Come on Harry, hopefully they have something more than tinned bean in the cupboards."

The house was up for sale. The muggles who once lived here clearly didn't anymore. Everything felt to staged, to clean, like Petunia had her way with bleach and his toothbrush. _A toothbrush._ The same blue in her hand as the one he'd found later in his small water cup. His teeth felt like they wore sweaters so he'd dragged it across as quick as he could but his tongue still tasted acrid for the hours he lay awake after.

Ginny ran her fingers down the silk petals of the fake flowers on the counter. She tossed up a fake apple and caught it with ease. She missed her broom. He knew how much. If he squinted, he could see the gold wings glittering on either side of her closed fist. He shook his head.

They both rummaged. The cupboard doors swung open and empty. "We'll have to call for take-away."

Hermione shook her head. "We've got a few pounds left."

"There's a shop a few miles up the road." Harry had walked there on the summer days that stretched too long, too hot. He'd stare at the ice pops in the freezer, thumb the lint in his pocket, and begin his walk back home.

"We can take the car." Ginny suggested, poking through the fridge like it held more than an open box of baking soda.

"We can walk." Hermione still looked down at her maps of of England, of Surrey, of Little Whinging, of London proper that she only brought out when she thought no one was looking. She silently muttered to herself, her lips fast moving, while staring at the small X's over the houses they'd already stayed in, never staying for too long. The two of them had once learned how to be mobile, how to live on the run, funny how it all came rushing back. Like riding a bike, if he'd ever been taught rather than climbing clumsily up one day when he thought Dudley wasn't looking and hoping his cousin wouldn't notice the scratches from where he'd fallen.

Only this time they knew what they were looking for, and they knew where that was. They just couldn't get there. So they kept moving.

"Ginny and I'll go before it gets too dark." He offered. Hermione waved him off without a look up.

"We could apparate." Ginny muttered under her breath as the door swung shut behind them.

* * *

It was like he hadn't left. The same cars in the drives. The same flowers lining the front walks. The same heat heavy on his neck. The same streets, same curves and bends, easy to follow, easy to lose yourself in.

And here he was, wandering Magnolia Crescent, vagrant again. A useless wand hidden deep in his pockets, something he dared not touch. The same bubbling frustration he thought he'd left behind at fifteen. It didn't matter how many nights now he laced up his trainers, stepping over Ginny's sleeping form, the two of them taking couches or floors, leaving Hermione the bedrooms so she could have some privacy. It didn't matter how many streets, how many houses, the same moon. It barely cleared his head, but it was something.

"You drank cider there I'm sure." Ginny snorted over at an old pair of swings set in the middle of a chain link fence. Rusted metal on bald, patchy grass.

It'd been a place to pass hot summer nights when he had memorized the cracks in his walls and the contours his fresh grief.

"That was more Dudley's scene."

"Gryffindor's golden boy."

"I like to stay moving."

She sighed. "Well, there's a silver lining."

He kicked at some rubbish collected around a storm drain.

"She'll be ok."

They never talked about Hermione much. Or her brother, none of them letting his name out, like something wild and rabid.

"She's got her plans."

"And you've got your walks."

He hadn't imagined it then; she had stirred each time he'd left.

* * *

Ginny was a quick study. That's probably why she was still alive.

She hadn't inherited her father's adoring fascination with muggles, but she also didn't get his weakness with pound coins. She counted them quietly in an aisle while Harry browsed the shelves.

"How much we have?"

"Hermione gave me a handful. A bit under five."

Harry swore and grabbed a box of pasta.

"Noodles and butter it is."

She knew when not to push something. She didn't always listen. But she did now. She let Harry stand and gave him the space to storm off towards the billowing cold of the open fridges along the back wall.

A muggle man watched Harry go, a shopping basket slung over the crook of his arm. He stopped midway through putting a box in. He set it back on the shelf. His eyes never left Harry.

"Pay's shit." Some dark laugh left her.

He turned to look now at her. He had hard eyes and couldn't have been more than a few years older.

"Fucking Tories."

He sneered at her joke. His shoes caught the fluorescents, the leather supple and blinding.

She was a quick study but she never was the best Seeker. She missed details. His pressed collar. His glinting wrist watch. The sheen of an expensive haircut.

_Shit._

She knew when to leave. She knew the difference between surrender and temporary retreat.

She cocked her brows at him. "Night then."

He grabbed her arm.

"Don't see Labor saving your cunt from the wizards do you? They'd love to jam their wands up your arse."

"I'll keep that in mind."

She walked as slowly as she could let herself, her hand finding the back of Harry's neck. "Got what you need, love?"

He had two sticks of butter in his hand. Salted and unsalted. And seemed to be in some faux silent debate. His face was set. He barely nodded.

She knew when to get out. They slipped back up the aisle towards the register.

"Find everything ok?"

"Fine." Harry threw the coins at the freckled cashier, but she looked up at Ginny her wide metallic smile falling.

It wasn't until they left Hogwarts that everyone kept saying how much she and her closest brother looked alike. Must have been something in the nose. They'd loved to tease Harry mercilessly about it. _Didn't know you wanted to shag me that bad, Harry. _

"Getting a bit dark out there." Ginny tried to smile back at the girl, looking for a hint of the lattice work of braces across the girl's teeth, needing the returned smile to be wide enough.

But she only nodded and threw the pasta box and the butter in a plastic bag and handed it to them without meeting their eyes.

Harry's hand slipped down to the small of her back, his head low, and the two walked from the store without breaking stride until they'd crossed the carpark, gone down the street, and hidden in the trees, watching the blue and red lights of the local police pull down the road they'd just left.

Harry kicked at a tree and swore. She took his hand in hers and they kept walking.

She was a Chaser. She knew what her teammates were thinking before they did. She knew which goal the other side's Keeper would gamble to protect. She could see the tide of the game turn.

She knew when the raids started. She'd left practice, gone straight home and found it empty. She'd been living still at the Burrow. _Just for a bit, Mum, I'm not guaranteed a career forever. Not a stable field, Quidditch._

"You're not going out again." He muttered darkly when they were thick within the trees. He took a branch and slashed it at the underbrush, clearing a path for their quick stomping, and she knew he was aching for his wand. He wouldn't have even dared pick up a branch in front of Hermione.

"I'm not hiding." What they were doing, whatever they were doing, prolonged rescue mission or endless refugee wandering, they weren't hiding. She refused.

"And I'm not watching you on the news."

"But you can go? Harry Potter, Little Whinging weirdo, is gonna blend it that much better? You don't think they all don't know _exactly_ what you are now?"

"I don't look exactly like _him_!"

"You don't look like one of them!"

He flattened his fringe over his scar as best he could, but he never could get it to stay down. _Ten Ways to Spot A Wizard: A Guide for Concerned Citizens. 1) Odd Marks or Moving Tattoos_. One of the first pieces all the stations had run. They'd played it on loop for days.

They burst through the trees and back out into a stretch of square houses. Harry immediately dropped the branch like he was shocked. They both worked to slow their breathing, walking arm in arm, trying to seem for all who might be peering through their curtains, like two lovers out for a stroll having come back from a last minute shopping bid.

She didn't know where her mother was. Or brothers.

It wasn't like they could floo and let her know they were alive. She was already trying to find Ron and she didn't even know if there was anything left to find.

Harry rapped loudly at the door to their usurped house on Magnolia Crescent. Hermione let them inside, white faced with a ramrod spine, and slammed the door behind them when they'd barely crossed the threshold.

At least there was an answer with Dad. It was muggles who'd killed him, in the end. The things we love do end up destroying us.

She could have, very easily, fallen off her broom.

* * *

Harry cooked the meal. The gas for the range and the oven were off, but he did his best with the microwave. He could see Ginny's itching fingers out of the corner of his eye. It'd be so easy to light the range. Just one wave. So he sent her to set the table and fill the water glasses and she knew exactly what he was doing.

Hermione took her meal, microwaved pasta, in the formal dining room. Her maps spread out across the wood. Most nights she wouldn't touch anything, but he and Ginny would always offer.

The two of them ate in silence at the little table in the nook off the kitchen. Holding hands, playing with each other's fingers, something to do. She did the washing while he dried, his hands finding the small of her back, until he pulled her around to face him and they found each other, quietly, chastely.

This could have been their own kitchen. They could have settled in after a lively meal with spirited talk of Quidditch trials and who England was going to sign for Chaser – _it _has _to be Worthington! Are you fucking blind, Potter? Too many bludgers to the skull, everyone knows it's gonna be Fletcher_ \- stretching out on their couch, no doubt some hand-me-down from her parents, and knotting their limbs until her freezing feet found his. It wouldn't be _this_ house. It'd be a flat in London somewhere. Some place with light and warmth, some place that Ron and Hermione would have visited – _We'd brought a nice red but Ron's impossible and dropped the bottle while apparating. Hey! Your hair was tickling my nose! –_ where her parents would come by. Where Bill and Fleur and George. Even Charlie. And Fred. And Remus with Tonks and Teddy. And Sirius, beaming. The extension charms fit to burst, so many people to fit at one table, that they ended up sitting two-to-a-seat, the wood before them buckling under Molly's fabulous cooking.

Ginny shifted her feet over his and they chilled to her touch. She let her head fall against his chest, softly, her fingers finding his and again lightly tracing them. He turned on the muggle telly. The place still had power and they got a few channels. They settled on a game show, a bright wheel spinning, and he let the colors wash over him.

Hermione stumbled in and fell quietly into an armchair beside them, tucking her knees up under her, and reached for the remote, changing it to the news.

She did in each house and each time Ginny would mutter while brushing her teeth. "I don't know why she does it to herself."

"Someone's gotta keep up with what's happening."

It was worse in the beginning, when the newscasters kept talking about the raids. The three of them had sat in stunned silence and watched Michael Corner strung up in front of pub. In blazing red paint beneath: _CURSED BLOOD_. A piece on the rise of violent anti-wizard crime. Ginny ran out of the flat they'd been hiding in and didn't return for a day, coming back with glassed eyes. Hermione sat ramrod still until she shook. Harry threw up and picked at the scar on his forehead until it bled. Like it'd ache again, and they'd have problems they knew how to solve.

Harry had spat the rest of his mouthwash in the sink. It'd been a nice flat, that one, the couple who owned it was on holiday. A view of the city, St. Paul's in the distance, Tate Modern, the Thames. So many people buzzing below them. The double deckers and black cabs that would crowd the streets. The school groups that would shuffle into the museums. The crowds that snaked like rivers.

"This used to be her world too."

He hadn't touched Ginny that night, and she didn't instigate either.

* * *

Hermione came to him late.

It wasn't like he was sleeping. He'd been eyeing his trainers, Ginny sleeping on the couch above him. He'd taken the floor. She'd called him too chivalrous for his own good after he insisted, but they both knew it was because he'd have an easier time leaving from the floor without waking her.

"Harry, can I talk to you?"

She wasn't sheepish. Her hands were balled around the sleeves of her jumper, but he knew she just liked to keep them busy. The threads were frayed and hung away from her wrists.

Sometimes seeing her made him ache. So clearly he could see the shock of red hair beside her, long arms swinging and hitting him in the narrow stone hallways, that booming laugh.

Hermione brought him through the sitting room, past the kitchen, and down the hallway. His eyes flickered towards it when they walked past it, he knew they would.

"We should check it for supplies."

"It'll be cleaning stuff."

"You never know what people store under there."

He'd never told her. She had a way of knowing things though, so he couldn't be sure.

They sat at the formal dining table surrounded by glass cabinets and chests of china and silver, all staged. All never been touched.

They sat in the dark. The moon strained through the windows. Her face half in shadow.

"We have to go back towards London."

"Hermione, we've been over this."

"We aren't the only ones out there. I've been hearing stories on the wireless. People from the Ministry even, gathered in secret."

She sounded just like him, how he'd been back in the tent. He didn't dare say it.

"I thought you were supposed to be the logical one here."

"They can't have gotten everyone in the raids."

"What's left of the Ministry won't be in London. The raids wiped the place clean. They'll be far off."

"He might be there." She said it very quietly. Neither of them spoke. Hanging between them was the heavy unsaid thing they carried with them to each knew house: _if he wasn't already dead._

"Not at the Ministry. But in London. That's where they kept the first… prisoners." She swallowed around the word. All three of them had watched the executions. Or rather, he and Ginny had left the room. Hermione watched each face. He knew which she was looking for.

"It's not like we can get out of England." She said.

They'd learned one evening a few months back, when Hermione had changed the channel back over to the the news, of new blood testing at immigration points and the wizards who'd been caught trying to flee the country before word had spread.

"We could apparate."

"_Harry._"

She flinched like the Dursley's had at any mention of magic.

"Sorry. But we could."

"You know what the theory is on international apparition."

"_Possible range of apparition can be understood as the knowledge of location in relation to the physical distance seeking to be travel in direction correlation to the degree of the power of the wizard seeking to apparate, not factoring in side-apparition elements."_ He could recite it in his sleep, the amount of times he heard her muttering it.

A few wizards tried it in the early days. Body parts scattered across the highlands. Some tried to swim the channel. Muggle fishing boats pulled the live ones out.

"Hermione, I know we can't just sit here. But going to London – "

"Stop."

"I don't like it either – "

"Harry. _Stop talking._"

She grabbed his wrist and pulled him down from the windows.

"Someone's here."

A long, low scratching at the glass. He heard the rustle of blankets, knew Ginny had bolted upright from the couch. She still had her wand on her. Like him, she'd refused to part with it. Hermione had snapped hers the moment they'd gone of the run.

He saw a flicker of something in the yard. He slowly stood.

"_Harry…_" Hermione moaned and swiped at his ankles.

But he walked towards the windows and the lumbering figure picking at the locks.

He felt rather than heard Ginny move through the dark hallway behind him.

She was the first one to speak.

"Dean?"


End file.
